A R Ammons Poems

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by Ammons, A R

 Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads

and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to

find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look

down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 When the crow
lands, the
tip of the sprung spruce

bough weighs
so low, the
system so friction-free,

the bobbing lasts
way past any
interest in the subject....Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 It was May before my
attention came
to spring and

my word I said
to the southern slopes
I've

missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:

don't worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if

you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain

it's not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
 of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
 by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:

an order of instinct prevails
 through all accidents of circumstance,
  though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
   webs:
   you can go all
  around the fringing attachments

  and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
 numerous occasions of accident:

2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:

 how...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though
that, too -- but the
uninterfering means on...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 Fall's leaves are redder than 
spring's flowers, have no pollen, 
and also sometimes fly, as the wind 
schools them out or down in shoals 
or droves: though I 
have not been here long, I can 
look up at the sky at night and tell 
how things are likely to go for 
the next hundred million years: 
the universe will...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 All afternoon
the tree shadows, accelerating,
lengthened
till
sunset
shot them black into infinity:
next morning
darkness
returned from the other
infinity and the
shadows caught ground
and through the morning, slowing,
hardened into noon....Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 After a long
muggy
hanging
day
the raindrops
started so
sparse
the bumblebee flew
between
them home...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 You think the ridge hills flowing, breaking
with ups and downs will, though,
building constancy into the black foreground

for each sunset, hold on to you, if dreams
wander, give reality recurrence enough to keep
an image clear, but then you realize, time

going on, that time's residual like the last
ice age's cool still in the rocks, averaged
maybe with the cool of the age before,...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 The reason to be autonomous is to stand there,
a cleared instrument, ready to act, to search

the moral realm and actual conditions for what
needs to be done and to do it: fine, the

best, if it works out, but if, like a gun, it
comes in handy to the wrong choice, why then

you see the danger in the effective: better
then an autonomy...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 You'll rejoice at how many kinds of **** there are:
gosling **** (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish **** (the generality), trout

****, rainbow trout **** (for the nice), mullet ****,
sand dab ****, casual sloth ****, elephant ****
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest ****,

horse **** (a favorite), caterpillar **** (so many dark
kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 The reeds give
way to the

wind and give
the wind away...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
 I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
 I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
 in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 One failure on
Top of another...Read more of this...

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by Ammons, A R

 A day without rain is like
a day without sunshine...Read more of this...

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